Super Slow boot from any start up disk.

Question

I have a Macbook Pro that takes about 5+ minutes to boot up. The really weird thing is that this occurs when booting from different drives. I have tried two different drives with Snow Leopard on them and then wiped one and tried to install leopard fresh from the original system disks.
I have tried swapping in different ram and resetting SMC and pram. No luck.
So apparently there is something going on during startup that doesn't have to do with the drive installed. Anyone have any idea what that might be and how to fix it?
thanks.

Answer 1

I would approach them. The thing is in Czech Republic where I live the law grants us two years warranty. As Apple only provides one year warranty (Apple care is not supported in Czech Rep.) the second year is probably covered by Apple local apple dealers which reflects in Apple prices heavily, which are at about 3/2 to twice bigger than in US.
Anyway this means that very few stores here are really happy to help with anything their customer wants (There is very little selection so either you cannot be picky, or you can buy mac abroad which has many downsides as well). I took it there yesterday and they sent it for diagnostics (I had previous experience with people working in local service center and honestly I'll be afraid to let them repair a mixer, let alone my beloved Mac), now I am trying to contact them about it and convince them that the part should be replaced under it's own warranty as they already replaced it about half a year ago. But I am afraid that won't be possible, as I suspect them of using old parts on machines not covered by Apple original warranty as they have to pay for them.
But back to my issue. I didn't really mean the soldering. That would be a last resort, or I'd have to be sure where exactly the problem is or I would have to have a new logic board at hand. I study robotics and although I am by no means an expert on such things, I have managed to repair a thing or two at a fraction of a new part price for another few years.
Anyway, the day before yesterday I sat near my MBP, installed the new security update few hours before that, copying some stuff from one drive to another via Firewire. I unplugged the first drive after a while and plugged in the second one. No strange sound, no burning, but the port couldn't even power a LED on the drive. I connected the first one, dead as well. So I tried USB which worked just fine. I thought it may have been caused by the update, so I restarted - no luck (Another problem appeared - slow start...and rather horribly slow one. The system was apparently searching for something, because the blue screen stayed on for about ten minutes after 5 minute booting and then it jumped right to the GUI with few apps already running in about a second), repaired permissions - no luck, backed up my stuff and tried a fresh install as the system was a bit cluttered and I planned on doing that sometime soon anyway, but that didn't help either. So I went hunting for a solution online. I tried probably every possible restart of this and that (PMU, unplugging everything and taking out battery and letting it rest overnight, SMC...you name it). In system profiler there was something like that Firewire cannot recognize a connected device (Not sure now really, I'd have to go through 263 page long pdf to find out. It was the same message mentioned above. I tried logging in safe mode, that was a bit slow but went rather smoothly, still no luck with FW. I went to verbose mode, which ran just fine, I don't really remember any strange messages, but after a minute or two presented the same blue screen and ran the GUI for some reason. That repeated every time. Also booting from SL DVD took about 15 minutes.
That's pretty much the whole story. From searching for a few hours I am now aware of a partial solution by deleting all Firewire related kext files, but I have no machine to test it on at the moment. That would of course cause FW not to work (Which I would hate really as I bought three new drives about a month ago and USB is a pain to backup to), but at least the booting should go smoothly.
I had an issue or two previously with my MBP, one of which was caused by the faulty graphics (hopefully new board, no questions asked) and the other one was probably caused by some so called expert repairing the first issue who wasn't even able to connect the display properly. For some reason they replaced the whole clamshell module with a brand new LCD which was nice.
Sorry for so long post, I guess I am just not able to keep things short.
Thanks, John.